How Yad Vashem is implementing AI to give every Holocaust victim a name

The World Holocaust Remembrance Center works to pinpoint victim names previously lost among 230 million text documents; museum seeks to record 5 million victim names by 2029

By Matt Lebovic

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5 May 2024, 4:14 pm Edit

Reporter at The Times of Israel

Like many Holocaust survivors, Olga Katz gave Yad Vashem in Jerusalem the names of her immediate family members murdered in the genocide.

Born in Belgium in 1933, Katz survived the war hidden in a convent with false papers. In 2017, she gave Yad Vashem an interview in which she shared the names of her immediate family members who were murdered. However, Katz did not share the names of her more distant relatives.

“By feeding her testimony through our innovative Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology, Yad Vashem was able to extract the names of additional family members, previously unknown, who were murdered in Auschwitz during the Holocaust — including [Katz’s] grandmother, uncles and nephews,” Shira Roth of Yad Vashem’s Information Technology Division told The Times of Israel.

Katz’s family members were among 73,000 victim names added to Yad Vashem’s central database in 2023. While some of the names were added by people filling out Pages of Testimony — the traditional means through which the name of someone murdered in the Holocaust has been reported to Yad Vashem — increasingly, new names are being located through an AI-based pilot program.

AI allows millions of documents to be sorted and triangulated to uncover overlooked information. Software can make connections within Yad Vashem’s massive archive that a human worker would not have the time or ability to make.

In the years ahead, the museum — whose name in Hebrew means “a memorial and a name” — will make expanded use of AI to pinpoint previously unidentified victims, said spokesperson Simmy Allen.

Page of Testimony from Yad Vashem (Courtesy)

Since the 1950s, more than 4,900,000 Holocaust victim names have been recorded by Yad Vashem. Many Jewish families and communities were totally destroyed by the Nazis, leaving no one behind to record their names as victims.

“AI helps us by reviewing testimonies and extracting names that have until now gone unnoticed,” said Allen. “Up until recently we predominantly relied on human intervention, however this process is extremely time-consuming.”

Each year, millions of documents are donated to Yad Vashem, said Allen.

“Within the next three to five years, Yad Vashem hopes to reach more than 5,000,000 names. Yet, as we move further away from the events of the Holocaust, our work becomes much more challenging,” said Alexander Avram, director of Yad Vashem’s Shoah Names Recovery Project.

AI helped locate the misplaced photo of Paula Tischkowski, who perished in Auschwitz in 1942, among Yad Vashem’s 500,000 images (Courtesy)

Yad Vashem houses 230 million pages of text documents, in addition to more than half a million photographs. This summer, a permanent, underground archive — six stories deep — will open to the public.

‘Reliability and precision’

The term Artificial Intelligence is used widely, but what AI means is not well understood.

Before an AI model could be deployed at Yad Vashem, researchers had to determine how the names on their war-era lists could be sorted by AI, said Roth.

“Our initial step was to identify and understand the database NER (Named Entity Recognition) and the Relation Extraction,” said Roth.

“We trained a SPAcY model. This model, combined with pattern matching techniques, yielded an impressive accuracy rate exceeding 95%,” Roth told The Times of Israel.

Gilad Erdan, Permanent Representative of Israel to the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, United Nations Secretary General, and Dani Dayan, Chairman of Yad Vashem, inspect the Yad Vashem Book of Names of Holocaust Victims Exhibit, Jan. 26, 2023, at UN headquarters. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

Whereas the museum’s technology once consisted of black binders with Pages of Testimony, staffers now deploy AI tools that were unfathomable a generation ago.

“To further bolster the reliability and precision [of our model], we integrated substantial logical code, collaborating closely with content experts from Yad Vashem,” said Roth.

The award-winning AI tool developed by Roth and her colleagues yielded remarkable results in the case of a survivor previously known only as Swajlach, a veterinarian from Lithuania.

“Swajlach was married to Eta Grudzanski, who is listed as having been murdered in 1941, in Jurbarkas,” said Avram.

One of several pits in which the Nazis and their local collaborators shot and killed tens of thousands of Jews during the Holocaust in Ponary, outside of Vilnius, Lithuania, July 2019 (Raphael Ahren/The Times of Israel)

A pivotal link to the name Swajlach was in the testimony of survivor Menachem Lichtenstein, who spoke about a man named Peter Swajlach who was married to a woman named Etele.

“This testimony also refers to six other members of the Grudzinski family, most probably Etele’s relatives,” said Avram.

Swajlach and his wife were murdered by Lithuanian “locals,” said Avram.

No one ever filled out Pages of Testimony for their couple’s relatives, but Yad Vashem’s AI tool connected the Grudzinski family to Swajlach through Lichtenstein’s testimony.

“Thanks to [AI] these names can now be added to the database so we can restore an identity from the oblivion of the Holocaust, and also give a better picture of who they were before they fell victim to antisemitism,” said Avram.